A juvenile orangutan seized from an apartment in the Indian city of Mumbai in 2024 has been repatriated to its native Indonesia, following two years of health and procedural delays. The endangered animal was transferred to the Sumatra Rescue Alliance facility on the island of Sumatra, where experts plan to prepare it for eventual release into the wild, reports Mongabay India’s Arathi Menon. Orangutans are listed in Appendix I of CITES, the global wildlife trade treaty, which bans the international commercial trade in wild-caught individuals. “This is the first successful repatriation of a seized CITES animal from India and my office did everything in our capacity to make it happen,” said Yogesh Nilkand Warkad, assistant management authority of CITES in Mumbai. Sinan Serhadli, a conservation scientist and adviser to Yayasan Orangutan Sumatera Lestari–Orangutan Information Centre (YOSL-OIC), which manages the Sumatra Rescue Alliance where the orangutan is headed, said that after a designated quarantine period, the juvenile will attend a forest school to acquire survival skills. “If all goes to plan, he can be released in the wild in about four years,” he said. The successful repatriation has renewed international focus on five infant orangutans that were rescued from the forests of Odisha state in India in September. Estimated to be between 1 and 1.5 years old, the infants remain at Nandankanan Zoological Park in Bhubaneswar, Odisha’s capital, while authorities investigate their origins and suspected trafficking. Panut Hadisiswoyo, founder of the Orangutan Information Centre, which founded the Sumatra Rescue Alliance, credited…This article was originally published on Mongabay

From Conservation news via This RSS Feed.